Former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, who ran unsuccessfully as the Republican nominee in the 2010 Connecticut Senate race, will announce on Tuesday her much-expected campaign for 2012, for the seat being vacated by Democrat-aligned independent Joe Lieberman.
McMahon will face a primary against former Rep. Chris Shays. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed McMahon leading Shays by 15 points for the primary — but then trailing both of the prominent Democratic candidates, Rep. Chris Murphy and former Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz.
The Hartford Courant reports that McMahon will make her announcement tomorrow at Coil Pro Machinery, a manufacturing plant in Connecticut, and pitch herself once again as a businesswoman running for office:
A statement alerting media to McMahon’s announcement said: “Jeff Gagnon founded Coil Pro in 1997 with one employee and a $1000-down payment on a 4,000 square foot warehouse. He has grown this company to a multi million-dollar-a-year enterprise with ten employees and an 18,000-square-foot facility, supporting American manufacturing right here in Connecticut.
“I am running for Senate to help give entrepreneurs like Jeff the legislative support they need to succeed,” McMahon said. “If we are going to get our economy growing again, government needs to be a partner, not an adversary to job creators. We need to send to Washington people who know how the economy works, who know how job creators think, who have created jobs and who have had to deal with the real-world consequences of the taxes and regulations Congress passes. You don’t fix the problems in Washington by sending back the same people who created them. I’m a job creator, I’m not a politician.”
McMahon won the Republican nomination in the 2010 election, defeating former Rep. Rob Simmons and Peter Schiff, a financial analyst and Ron Paul adviser. However, despite the year’s overall strong Republican wave, she lost the general election to Democrat Richard Blumenthal by a 55%-43% margin.
By the end of the campaign, polling consistently showed that McMahon had become personally unpopular with the voters. This occurred for several reasons, ranging from a backlash against her heavy personal spending on the race, and attacks on WWE for its lewd programming content and health problems among its actors attributed to performance-enhancing drugs.
Her husband, WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon, also popped up frequently in the campaign — responding to political attacks on WWE, and handing out WWE merchandise near polling places. There was also an amusing election-eve comedy sketch in which he played his fictionalized self-character “Mr. McMahon” — a long-running villain of the TV series –Â waking up from a coma and being horrified to discover that his wife had spent $50 million on the campaign.
